civic passion

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2013 14: 5 originally published online 2 May 2012Television New MediaFredrik Miegel and Tobias Olsson

Civic Passion: A Cultural Approach to the ''Political''

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442986 TVN14110.1177/1527476412442986Miegel and OlssonTelevision & New Media

1Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Corresponding Author:Tobias Olsson, Jönköping University, School of Education and Communication, Box 1026, Jönköping, 55111, Sweden Email: [email protected]

Civic Passion: A Cultural Approach to the “Political”

Fredrik Miegel1 and Tobias Olsson1

Abstract

Within media studies the default perspective of “the political” and “the civic” is overly rational. This rational bias can be observed within various research traditions. Two obvious examples are traditional, mainstream research of political communication, and substantial parts of the large body of research drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. Starting from a short review of the rational view of the political/the civic presented within these traditions, Peter Dahlgren’s notion of civic culture is analyzed as a perspective that offers a complementary view. This article elaborates on its intellectual origins by paying special heed to the connection between the civic-culture view of the political and the civic and the perspectives offered by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Departing from these insights, the article presents empirical illustration of everyday workings of civic culture, and concludes with reflections concerning what becomes of the media within a civic culture approach.

Keywords

civic culture, Dewey, media, political, Habermas, youth council

Within media studies, the default perspective of “the political” and “the civic” is an overly rational one. This rational bias can be observed within a number of research traditions. Two obvious examples are traditional, mainstream research of political communication, and substantial parts of the large body of research drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. Starting from a short review of the rational view of the political and the civic presented within these traditions, the notion of civic culture is a perspective that offers a complementary view. The article will then elabo-rate on its intellectual origins by paying special heed to the connection between this

Articles

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6 Television & New Media 14(1)

view of the political and the civic and the perspectives offered by pragmatist philoso-pher John Dewey. Departing from these insights, the article presents empirical illustra-tion of everyday workings of civic culture within a youth council, and concludes with reflections concerning what becomes of the media within a civic culture approach.

Traditional perspectives of political communication consider the media’s political and civic dimensions to be configured within an eternal triangle drama involving three parts: media, political power holders, and citizens (cf. Negrine 1996; Wheeler 1997). The drama is often also graphically depicted as a triangle, with political power hold-ers and the media at the top of the triangle—involved in horizontal exchange between one another—with the citizens at the bottom of the triangle involved in “vertical” exchange with political power holders and the media. The tradition’s perspective has been emblematically formulated by two of its most prominent advocates in the following way:

In very broad terms, the main components of a political communication system may be located in: 1 Political institutions in their communication aspects. 2 Media institutions in their political aspects. 3 Audience orientations to political communication. 4 Communication-relevant aspects of political culture. (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995, 5)

This figure of thought offers very rational, structured manuscripts for the three parts in the drama. Political power holders make political moves, inform, and try to influence opinion. The media monitor, compile, and disseminate information about political power holders. Citizens, in their corner of the triangle, consume political information offered by the media and political power holders and thereby create political opinions that—in the next instance—influence their ways of voting (which is a kind of exchange with political power holders). This perspective depicts the connection between media and the civic as an essentially rationally based relation between three formal parts.

For all the merits of the perspective offered by the field of political communication—for instance its great abilities to inspire measuring of opinion formation and analyzing the ways in which mass media represents politics—it also had its shortcomings. To start with, the tradition starts from a transmission view of communication, in which “political communication” mainly is understood as a rational, almost logistical flow of information between two or three actors within the triangle. As a consequence, a num-ber of important aspects concerning media and citizenship are overlooked. One such aspect concerns the citizens themselves and more particularly how they perceive and interpret “political” information in their everyday lives. A related problem is that the citizens become inscribed into a role that makes them appear as passive receivers of information. They become consumers of political information offered to them by the media and political power holders, which they use when establishing their opinions and—later on—vote in elections. This is a limited view of what it is to be a citizen and to act as one. Among other things, such a view of citizenship ignores its social and cultural conditions and practices.



Miegel and Olsson 7

The rational view of the political and the civic has also been equally present in much research inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s theory (Habermas [1962] 1989) of the public sphere (cf. Calhoun 1992; Gripsrud and Moe 2010). Such analyses tend to depart from those parts of Habermas’s work in which he stresses the importance of rational debates within the public sphere, where arguments and political points of view are presented and then thoroughly scrutinized by fellow citizens. In this context, media are supposed to play vital parts, both as sources of information inspiring the debates and as arenas for vibrant debates in themselves. Drawing on these lines of thought such research has analyzed, and above all criticized, contributions to the public sphere from “hard” media content, mainly various forms of “news” in TV, radio, and newspapers (cf. Garnham 1990; Kevin 2001; Olausson 2005). During the past decade an especially great deal of research has been brought to analyze the internet’s potential contribution to the public sphere in this regard (Dahlberg 2007; Poster 1997).

By stressing the media’s role as information sources that can inspire discussions, as well as their role as arenas for rational, political debates among citizens, media research has to a large extent played down a number of analytically valuable parts of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. One such part has been pointed out by Jim McGuigan (2005) as he reminds us about Habermas’s original separation between a political and a literary public sphere. McGuigan uses this distinction to argue for the need to also recognize an elaborated notion of a literary public sphere—a cultural public sphere—which then would include “the whole range of media and popular culture” (McGuigan 2005, 427). Related arguments have also been put forward by other scholars, high-lighting the vital interaction between public and the private spheres (for instance, Hermes 2006; Ytre-Arne 2011).

Dimensions of Civic CultureThe rational bias within media studies’ default views of the political and the civic makes up an important frame of reference for understanding the vitality in approach-ing this domain from a cultural perspective. Although having an interest in the politi-cal and the civic in common with these perspectives, Peter Dahlgren (Dahlgren 1999, 2000, 2003) is sympathetically critical regarding their points of departure. Drawing mainly on late modern cultural theory, he points out both benefits and important short-comings within these approaches. Apart from the already mentioned critique, which he mostly (but not always explicitly) shares, he is also careful to point out how these perspectives often lack an understanding of citizens as potential participants within the public sphere:

For all its compelling qualities, the perspective of the public sphere still leaves unclear a number of important issues. A key conceptual issue is that, while it asserts that people should, from a normative perspective, participate in the public sphere, this theoretic horizon does not have much to say about why




or how people actually participate in the public sphere. (Dahlgren and Olsson 2007, 200)

The why- and how-questions are also specifically central to Dahlgren’s notion of civic culture. We will return to them after a brief recapitulation of the general civic culture framework. Civic cultures were initially sketched as holding five separate but interrelated dimensions: (1) knowledge and skills; (2) values; (3) trust; (4) practices; (5) and identities (cf. Dahlgren 1999, 2003, for a more detailed account).

Knowledge and SkillsTo understand the world around and to be able to reflect on their own positions within it, citizens are in need of at least a minimum of knowledge. Hence, citizens—and a functioning civic culture—need access to reliable sources of information and analyses. This places demands on institutions such as schools and journalism, of course, to offer citizens such resources. Meanwhile, it also requires that the citizens themselves are active; a functioning democracy is in need of citizens that follow current debates and are involved in search for knowledge.

Communicative skills are of specific importance to civic cultures. These skills do not need to be very sophisticated—like writing letters to the editor, or being skilled at debating, etc.—but rather refers to more elementary competences, such as an understanding for the conditions of democratic opinion formation. The latter includes knowledge concerning concrete issues such as who owns the newspapers, who has access to national news media, and what are the conditions for participating within the public sphere for various social and cultural groups.

ValuesA functioning democracy needs virtues such as tolerance and a willingness to submit to democratic principles among its citizens. These virtues also need to be manifested in everyday life. This means, among other things, that citizens need to maintain and cultivate democracy as a system for conflict solution, that they make use of it as a system for balancing conflicting interests.

TrustTrust holds various dimensions. To start with, it points to the fact that functioning civic cultures need functioning democratic institutions, populated by reliable office holders (Rothstein 2001). It furthermore points to the importance of citizens’ ability to trust the political society and political processes at large, that they make sense and are meaningful to them. Another important instance of trust is horizontal trust between citizens themselves: “In the civic context we must also add trust between citizens.



Miegel and Olsson 9

They have to deal with each other to cooperate, to make things work” (Dahlgren and Olsson 2007, 201).

PracticesCitizenship—and democracy—also needs routines and traditions. It has to be embodied in concrete everyday practices such as meetings, debates, and decision making. In one of his many publications on the subject, Dahlgren hands out a number of concrete examples of such practices:

For example, having the social competence to call and hold a meeting, identify-ing issues, managing a discussion, and organizing and administering collective activities, are all important practices involving skills. Lobbying, bargaining, negotiating, mobilizing, initiating legal action, networking, and other activities can also be a part of a repertoire of civic practices. (Dahlgren and Olsson 2008, manuscript version, 499, 500)

Talk has a specifically preeminent position among these practices. Civic cultures need places, spaces, and contexts that promote discussions and debate among citizens. These discussions—usually smaller rather than bigger ones—can help generate and cultivate a communicative climate between citizens.

IdentitiesOne important aspect of civic cultures is their ability to help citizens understand themselves as, precisely, citizens. This does not necessarily mean that people actually should start referring to themselves as “citizens” but rather that they have a sense of themselves as at least potential parts of—and participants in—society. This makes it possible for citizens to

feel that they, in concert with others, can in some way make a difference, that they can have some kind of impact on political life, or least make a contribution in a political struggle. Civic identities involve some sense of political commu-nity, or affinity, with other, like-minded people. (Dahlgren and Olsson 2008, manuscript)

In his most recent writings, Dahlgren has completed these five original dimen-sions of civic cultures with yet another dimension—spaces (Dahlgren 2009, 114ff). More specifically, he has stressed that in order for civic cultures to flourish, and to be cultivated, they need both face-to-face and mediated spaces where citizens can meet and interact.

The six dimensions can be divided into two groups in a way that draws attention to the fact that different research traditions inspire the idea of civic cultures. Knowledge




and skills, values, and trust are closely related to perspectives brought from traditional political science (cf. Almond and Verba 1989; Putnam 2000). These dimensions are often paid attention to when, for instance, measuring civic competences among citi-zens (knowledge and skills), making opinion polls (measuring values), and analyzing the extent to which citizens trust politicians, the political system, and one another. The three latter dimensions—practices, identities, and spaces—however, are more clearly inspired by late modern cultural theory. They have obvious connections to fairly gen-eral ideas within cultural theory concerning how everyday routine practices are reflected and made sense of (cf. Silverstone 1994), regarding the emphasis put on notions of identity (Bauman 2001; Giddens 1990; Thompson 1995), and of course to the great interest in analyzing space (Lefebvre 1991; Morley and Robins 1995).

From ReasonApart from these two research traditions, there are also strands of Habermasian ideas in the notion of civic culture: first, in the emphasis put on media as an important institution in offering (and not offering) resources for the cultivation of civic cul-tures (Habermas [1962] 1989); second, in the importance ascribed to communication as such in both Habermas’s (1984) notion of communicative action and in Dahlgren’s emphasis on talk as a fundamental civic activity; and third, in the insistence on the democratic—and civic—value of participating and/or deliberating citizens, a taken-for-granted component in both Habermas’s and Dahlgren’s work, clearly distinguishing them from traditional, liberal notions of citizenship.

Despite these important similarities, there are also some explicit and very conscious differences between them. While Habermas’s (1984, 1987) concept of communicative action puts emphasis on the importance of the rationality of communicative relations between people in a society for them to reach mutual understanding, Dahlgren, much in the manner of other recent thinkers critical of the view of civic engagement as predomi-nantly rational deliberations, for instance Rorty (1989) and Taylor (1989), questions the ability of Habermas’s theory to account for what actually makes people want to engage and participate. This critique starts from the assumption that people’s convictions in moral, ideological, political, and other value issues are often based as much or more on affective and emotive considerations than on strictly rational ones. In Rorty’s (1989, 61) words: “Habermas is a liberal who is unwilling to be an ironist.” The ironist opinion, which Rorty advocates, is that contrary to Habermas’s view, language is not rational but fundamentally contingent, and so are people’s motives for thinking, communicating, and acting the way they do—especially when it comes to moral and other deliberation. Taylor (1989, 510), on the other hand, is critical of Habermas’s theory because it cannot account for “the search for moral sources outside the subject through languages which resonate within him or her,” and Dahlgren identifies similar shortcomings regarding the ability for a rationalistic approach to communicative action to explain the motives behind people’s civic engagement.



Miegel and Olsson 11

. . . to Passion

An important aspect of Dahlgren’s view of the rational aspect of civicness is, argu-ably, his above-mentioned increasingly stronger interest in the why-question regard-ing civic participation in the public sphere (as well as other societal spheres). In his most recent writing, the strand of skepticism regarding the role of rationality has been given an even more prominent position by means of a strong emphasis put on passions as an essential component in civic cultures (Dahlgren 2009, 83ff). What Dahlgren argues is, briefly, that rationality and reason cannot be the sole foundation for people’s engagement in civic matters and politics, but that it also has to involve an affective component, or passion as he calls it. The thought that there is an affective or emotive motivation inspiring people to reason as they do has its origin in Hume’s ([1739-1740] 1978, 415) dictum that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume did not apply the idea on political and civic engagement particularly, but its applicability on this field and its increasing importance for understanding democracy in modern society was instead recognized and elaborated by John Dewey two centuries later:

The simple fact is that all the deliberatively liberal and progressive movements of modern times have based themselves on the idea that action is determined by ideas, up to the time when Hume said that reason was and should be “the slave of the passions”; or in contemporary languages of the emotions and desires. Hume’s voice was a lonely one when he uttered the remark. The idea is now echoed and reechoed from almost every quarter. (Dewey [1937] 1994, 225)

For both Dahlgren and Dewey, the importance of passion for civic culture and democracy has to do with what they perceive as democracy’s fundamentally social character. The former argues that it is the passions for democratic values that both moti-vate people to civic engagement and create the civic bonds and affinities that link peo-ple together in civic cultures (Dahlgren 2009, 86). The latter argued that democracy is a social idea and a moral value realized only when it influences all kinds of relation-ships between people and engages them in joint efforts and deliberations to actualize the values they have agreed on to desire as good for themselves and their community. Democracy is thus indistinguishable from community life, according to Dewey ([1927] 1991; cf. Westbrook 1998). In his thoughts on the nature of moral, and hence demo-cratic, deliberation he expressed a similar view regarding the role of the passions as Dahlgren did almost a century later:

The conclusion is not that the emotional, passionate phase of action can be or should be eliminated in behalf of bloodless reason. More “passions”, not fewer, is the answer. (Dewey [1922] 2002, 195-96).




The reason for invoking Dewey’s theories of democracy in connection with Dahlgren’s arguments is thus not fortuitous, but motivated by the resemblances between the two thinkers’ ways of contemplating the notions of democracy and civic culture, not only regarding the importance they assign to passion in their respective theories on democracy but, as we will show, also in relation to the six dimensions of civic culture that Dahlgren (2009) distinguishes.

At the heart of both Dahlgren’s and Dewey’s theories is the question of how to increase and improve people’s opportunities for involvement, engagement, influence and impact in the democratic processes. That is, to strengthen the experience and sense of citizenship and to stimulate the emergence of what Dahlgren calls a civic culture among them. For both thinkers, a fundamental key to the answer lies in understanding the reasons behind why people become civically engaged. For both, furthermore, the importance they attach to the why-question rests on the assumption of an inherent peda-gogical dimension of civic engagement, stressing the significance of the process of learning how to become a citizen. Arguing that this very process “adds important ana-lytic dimensions to the sociology of democracy” (2009, 69), Dahlgren hints at the fun-damental importance of a pedagogical dimension in the development of a democratic society that John Dewey ([1916] 1966) has pointed out in his influential works on the relation between democracy and education. Dewey there argued for a kind of participa-tory democracy encouraging people to develop communities, within which each single individual is given equal opportunity to actualize his or her particular abilities and tal-ents through active participation in social, cultural, and political life.

For Dewey, a society built on such premises constituted the very definition of what a democracy is about. He held it to be an objective moral value, based on the idea that every member of a community shall have the same opportunities to make autonomous decisions and evaluations regarding matters concerning them. The citizens can, how-ever, develop and cultivate their abilities to do so only by being included in collective life forms in which they can engage in the kind of pertinent and informed critical dis-cussions that are required to solve actual problems and conflicts, and to reach mutually agreed on values. This view of Dewey’s is similar to what Dahlgren highlights with the one of his dimensions of civic culture, which has to do with the citizens’ embrac-ing of commonly shared values required for democracy to function as a system for conflict solution and problem solving. Creating and facilitating possibilities for peo-ple to become included in contexts, or communities, in which their opinions, views, and thoughts are listened to, recognized, and allowed to make a difference. Both Dewey and Dahlgren accentuate the significance of such recognition for the individual’s sense of belongingness to a community for people. This sense of belonging allows people to experience affinity and involvement in society, where there are possibilities to exercise real influence on politics and other matters of significance to them. Such engagement is seminal for citizens’ abilities to understand themselves as citizens.

People’s ability to understand and identify themselves as citizens is the main facet of the dimension of civic culture that Dahlgren calls identity, and it was of utmost importance also to Dewey. To feel affinity with the society or community to which one




belongs is essential because values, according to his perspective, consist of practical judgments regarding everything the citizens view as needed to be done. According to Dewey, such judgments are both conscious and intentional and founded on people’s desires and interests, or passions to use Dahlgren’s terminology. By reflecting on their passions and emotions, people come to understand what consequences it may lead to if they act on them, and they can, if they find the results undesirable, correct them to better fit with their values. According to Dewey, this is how people solve problematic situa-tions by developing what he calls desirable ends-in-view by contemplating concrete situations experienced as problematic (Dewey [1922] 2002).

The ability to formulate such end-in-views on matters concerning their actual life situations thus constitutes an important motivation for people to become civically engaged. Consequently, a key requisite for people to be able to exercise influence is the maintenance of a continuously ongoing dialogue both between the citizens themselves and between them and the various power holders of their society. Dahlgren calls this dimension of civic culture practices. Related to this dimension is the equally crucial prerequisite of the provision of accessible places for these dialogues between the citi-zens and the power holders that Dahlgren terms space. According to him, a flourishing civic culture needs spaces and places for both face-to-face and mediated interaction. Dewey held a similar position, but did perhaps put an even greater emphasis than Dahlgren on the need for face-to-face interaction.

In its deepest and richest sense a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse. (Dewey [1927] 1991, 211)

Although to different degrees, both Dewey and Dahlgren point out the qualities of physical communication and stress the continuously ongoing dialogue between citizens and power holders as an important facet of that sense of connection and involvement that both of them envision as a crucial aspect of a democratic society and a prosperous civic culture.

Dialogue and talk are not enough. For the experience of civic belongingness to survive and flourish, it must become manifested in concrete results that can confirm to citizens that they really are listened to and that their opinions actually do matter. This is the dimension of civic culture that Dahlgren calls trust. It is manifested in the citi-zens’ ability to rely on the politicians and officials to actually consider and recognize their judgments and opinions in their political decisions.

Another shared aspect of Dahlgren’s and Dewey’s respective theories is that both of them emphasize that a functioning democracy must be anchored in people’s everyday lives. “Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community,” states Dewey ([1927] 1991, 213). He argues that what is good for the individual is the same as what is good for the community to which he or she belongs; because every individual reflection on the circumstances of a situation aims to spend in tune the inter-ests of the individual with that of its community. Intelligence (creative intelligence as he calls it) is the means by which people reevaluate and revise their interests and desires,




and in the process they grow as human beings and become more responsible and sensi-tive to other people’s needs, demands, and desires. This view of Dewey’s, that civic engagement is rooted in the individual but inseparably intertwined with the group he or she belongs to, is shared by Dahlgren:

Also, while both engagement and participation can be seen as anchored in the individual, I would underscore that the political realm requires collectivities; the engagement and participation of the citizen are predicted on him/her being connected to others, by civic bonds (Dahlgren 2009, 81).

Returning finally to the pedagogical aspect of civic culture, it is most explicitly expressed by Dahlgren in the dimension he calls knowledge and skills. For Dewey, to be part of a community or collectivity requires of the individuals that they are capable to argue for their own points of view and are ready to listen to the opinions of others, which also demands of them to think self-critically and constantly weigh their own posi-tions against those of other persons. In order to do that, they need communicative skills and knowledge, and that is why Dewey argues for a free and equal process of communi-cation as a cardinal democratic ideal. He consequently regards mass education as a pre-requisite of democracy and, as Westbrook (1991, 53) points out, democracy for Dewey “relies as much on an equal distribution of knowledge as on an equal distribution of welfare,” if not more. As we have seen, Dahlgren also emphasizes the importance of the citizens’ access to communicative skills and competences in order for civic cultures to thrive and prosper. But whereas Dewey tied the development of these skills basically to the pedagogical institutions, Dahlgren to a much larger extent regards the pedagogic dimensions of the media as an important opportunity structure in this respect. That has obviously partly to do with the simple fact that Dewey, writing his work in the first half of the twentieth century, was in the blind regarding the possibilities and promises of the new immediate and interactive electronic media that Dahlgren discusses in relation to his ideas of civic culture. In this area, Dahlgren’s analyses certainly signify an impor-tant development and contemporization of Dewey’s reasoning.

Perhaps the most significant affinity between Dahlgren’s and Dewey’s analysis of civic culture, however, is their shared optimism regarding the future of democracy and their sympathetic confidence in people’s potential and ability to sustain and enhance civic culture and democratic values. Dewey was often criticized for being naïve in this faith of his, but his belief in people’s abilities to grow as responsible citizens, if given the chance, is not as farfetched as those critics would have it. As the American philoso-pher Hilary Putnam neatly argues in a defense of Dewey’s optimism, which holds equally true of Dahlgren’s:

It is true that the optimism about human potential that Dewey expresses is not something which has been proved to be right, nor does Dewey claim that it has been proved to be right. But, as Dewey empathetically points out, neither has pessimism about human potential been proved to be right. On the contrary,




whenever we have given previously oppressed groups a chance to display their capacities, those capacities have surprised us (Putnam 1992, 198).

Lund Youth Council—Empirical IllustrationsTo lend also some empirical support to Dewey’s and Dahlgren’s view on civic culture, we will briefly relate it to a case study1 of a successful Swedish youth political project (c.f. Miegel and Olsson, 2012) The project is called Lund Youth Council and aims at involving and increasing the influence of young citizens aged 12 to 25 in local poli-tics. In this ambition, it builds on a pedagogical aim to induce the young to learn to become citizens by helping them develop the knowledge and skills needed to exercise influence by democratic means.

The project started in 2002 and it builds on an explicit strategy to give the young almost entirely free reign to design a functioning and enduring method for them to exercise influence. That is, the very starting point of the project was precisely to let the young themselves answer the why- and how-questions emphasized by both Dahlgren and Dewey. The result was the establishment of a council where the young citizens meet four times a year to discuss issues they themselves identify as important with the local politicians and officials.

Between the meetings, continuous work is conducted within nine committees. The youth council also runs a website.2 Everything is entirely decided, designed, created, and maintained by the young citizens themselves, and the organization of the parlia-ment and its committees is completely horizontal and without any formal hierarchies or leaders. Participation is open to any young person in Lund and is entirely voluntary. The meetings of the council attract between 150 and 250 young people each time. At the time of writing the project has been active for almost ten years with no signs of decline whatsoever.

The main method the young people have chosen for conducting their influence is to keep open, constant, and regularly recurring dialogues, discussions, and debates with the power holders of the municipality. This is precisely the kind of civic activity that Dahlgren singles out in the dimension he calls practices. The municipality makes the town hall available for the council’s meetings, provides the premises for the commit-tees and pays the fees for the website run by the council, thus providing the spaces and places for both face-to-face and mediated interaction. Engagement in these practices must, however, lead to concrete results that can confirm to the citizens that their opin-ions actually do matter. That is, the young citizens must be able to trust the power holders to take their opinions into account, and in Lund they often do. A particularly illustrative example is how a group of young people engaged in the youth council managed to get a culture house to run by themselves, as a result of a long dialogue with the politicians in power:

We have an activity here that actually means something, that means something not just because it makes a lot of young people feel good, but we know that the




youth parliament have power and their method of exercising influence is through dialogue, not by being a referral body or captives or hostages sitting in a corner expected to answer a lot of questions, but it is through this dialogue. And this house is an evident example of that. It was not like they were writing a lot of things and demanded it, but it was a continuous dialogue started by one of committees, a group of kids that thought “Hey, we want a meeting place in the city center, we want some place to go”, and then they tried to talk, and even-tually it was realized . . . their dream [came] true. (Interview with one of the officials responsible for the youth political work in Lund)

This quotation also comprises the working of Dahlgren’s six dimensions of civic culture. The young citizens demonstrate their communicative and argumentative skills and knowledge in their successful negotiations with the power holders. Their strategy for reaching their aim by dialogue is based on democratic values and principles for conducting influence by means of convincing by good arguments. The young trust the politicians to listen to and take their arguments seriously, and the politicians in turn trust the young citizen’s abilities by accepting their arguments and acting on them according to their will. The establishment of enduring and accessible channels and forums for regular dialogue, debates, and meetings between the young citizens and the local power provides the necessary practices for the young to give voice to their opinions and have them listened to by the local power holders. The municipality also supplies the adequate spaces and places where this both physical and mediated talk and interaction can take place in making available the town hall for the youth council’s meetings and paying the fees for keeping its website online. In meeting the young citizens’ desire for a culture house by giving them the financial means to realize it, the politicians acknowl-edge the young as important participants in the municipality, thereby strengthening their ability to identity as citizens and sustain precisely what Dahlgren calls an enduring civic culture among them.

The success of Lund Youth Council neatly illustrates Dewey’s and Dahlgren’s important common insight, that in order to improve democracy we must understand what motivates people to engage and participate in it, from their perspective. That means asking them what their passions, desires, and ambitions are, and to start from there.

ConclusionConclusively, the case illustrates—in concentrated form—the central weight both Dewey and Dahlgren put on the process of learning to become a citizen for understanding civic culture. The main difference between the two authors in their common line of thought is that for Dewey the educational institutions constituted the key opportunity structure within which this learning process should take place. Dahlgren, working in a completely different media society than Dewey, expands the line of thought by including also the increasingly vital pedagogical role played by both traditional mass media and new,




social and interactive media in the opportunity structure within which people today learn to become citizens.

The view of the media offered by this perspective—the media as an opportunity structure for learning citizenship—ought to be inspiring for the field of media studies; above all for scholars addressing media’s political and civic aspects. The rational, default perspective referred to in the introduction of this article offers only a partial understanding of the part played by media in cultivating citizenship. A view of the media as an opportunity structure for civic cultures calls for more fine grained analy-ses of various different ways in which media interplay with people in their roles and identities as citizens.

From such a point of departure, the logistical flow of rational information is but one small part played by the media. Instead, research also has to attend to the ways in which media foster skills, inspire values and trust, teach civic practices, and allow for civic spaces and identities to prosper. To put it short: research needs to dig into the everyday life of civic engagement and participation.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:This article is based on data from the research project “Organized producers of net culture”, which is funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.

Notes

1. The case study focused on the Youth Council per se and made use of methods such as observations during meetings, focus groups with members of the council, and individual interviews with coordinators. As a consequence, the perspective applied here is more of an organizational perspective than one that pays attention to individual members’ reception of the website (and/or their practices). The latter approach is of course potentially also an important one, but not within the scope of this article.

2. The website itself as well as the ways in which it is related to the youth council’s civic culture has been analyzed within a previous article (Miegel and Olsson, 2012). That article revealed, among other things, how the young people engaged within the youth council tend not to make any “sharp distinctions between what is online and what is offline. . . . For the younger generation, lacking experience of a world without the web, the distinction appears more or less superfluous, as is expressed when one of the young people engaged in the coun-cil actually likens the structure of the youth council to the structure of the internet.” (Miegel and Olsson, 2012, 487-499).

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Bios

Fredrik Miegel, PhD in sociology, is assistant professor in Media and Communication studies at Lund University, Sweden. His main fields of research include youth culture and lifestyle, the sociology of culture, and the theory of social science.

Tobias Olsson, PhD, is professor of Media and Communication studies at Jönköping University, Sweden. He is currently also head of the research project “Organized Producers of Young Net Cultures” (Swedish Knowledge Foundation).



civic passion

Documents

civicculture view

civic culture approach

politicalthe civic

rational view

comtelevision new media

rational bias

various research traditions

number of research traditions